Was Trump’s Tweet Racist, or the Media’s Suppression of It?

Media fail in their duty to the people

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Dr. Alan Keyes

Fox News, Paul Ryan and other elitist faction minions false touted as "conservatives" are feeding the elitist faction media frenzy against President Donald Trump's tweet of a commercial highlighting the danger Americans face from the foreign forces attempting to invade our country in violation its laws, and the sovereignty of the people of the United States. Media outlets have a constitutional right to air criticisms of President Trump's action. But their refusal to allow members of the sovereign body politic to judge for themselves is a bold and egregious interference with that sovereign's prerogative of judgment.

The cry of "racism" is no excuse for insulting the nation's sovereign in this way. This lèse-majesté (i.e., derogation of sovereign authority) takes place just before the sovereign's constitutionally mandated and most important duty, which is: to decide the composition the only branch of government that, when it has sufficient political will to do so, may impeach and remove from office any and all civil officers of the government of the United States, including the president, the vice president and all the justices of the Supreme Court.

Private individuals (including privately owned corporations) cannot be authorized to interfere with this judgment of the sovereign body of the people. For more than one reason, such interference must be regarded as a criminal act when doing so involves suppressing information from the duly elected president of the United States. When his communication pertains to an ongoing, immediate threat to the nation, it may be tantamount to treason. It is not for private individual or corporate persons to decide for the sovereign body politic what information its members are qualified to consider. It is not for them to enact judgment against the nation's chief executive.

When the activities of the public information media impinge on vital public judgments, it is their responsibility to inform the sovereign body politic, not interfere with the activity of high officials duly elected to act with authority on its behalf. Isn't this why information media may be subject to arrest and prosecution when they refuse to divulge information to public authorities, constitutionally warranted by law to demand that they do so?

But in the present instance, the information has been made available by the highest executive authority in the land. The information media that suppress it are interfering with the president's performance of his duty. Since when are the privileged communications between the sovereign (in this case the body politic of the American people) and the highest minister of government subject to suppression by private individuals and corporations? Since when do they have the prerogative to gag the president of the United States?

Ultimately, even the Supreme Court has no authority to do so. Only the Congress of the United States has that power, through the process of impeachment and removal. But our periodic elections are the sovereign body politic's means of deciding the composition of Congress. When private individuals and corporations keep information from the public that is pertinent to the election they have to make, they are interfering in that election. They are usurping the power of the sovereign. Like the individuals seeking to force their way into our country, these media outlets are seeking to force their way will upon our elections. If information is power, then withholding pertinent information is the deployment of power against the people to keep them in the dark.

I partly grew up in Augusta, Georgia, when public facilities like buses and schools were still segregated there.

Like Jack Nicholson's character in the movie A Few Good Men, the elitist media, their political cohorts and their money-masters are telling American voters, in no uncertain terms "You can't handle the truth." As members of the sovereign body politic of the United States, voters should, in no uncertain terms, respond to their insult by rejecting their bid for control.

On this election day, I conclude the only way to do so is to vote down the Democrats whose agenda the elitist faction media’s specious cry of "racism" exemplifies and serves. Conservatives should also, from now on, withhold their trust from elitist faction politicians like Paul Ryan and elitist faction fellow travelers like Fox News, whatever their pretense of conservatism.

As for the charge of racism, we should judge its truth in the light of its consequences, not its service to the globalist, totalitarian political agenda that seeks to dictate choice (i.e., establish dictatorship) by withholding knowledge. I was still a child in the 1950s. I partly grew up in Augusta, Georgia, when public facilities like buses and schools were still segregated there. So I remember being pulled nervously from the first available seat and led by my mother to a seat across the color line.

I still feel pride and hope when I think of Rosa Parks' refusal, and the movement for justice it helped to rouse. But I have never reproached my mother for her nervous compliance. I was a military brat, raised mostly on Army bases, desegregated by President Truman's executive order in 1946. My parents understood that every person involved in military life was, as it were, given responsibility for the nation's perception of the result. My mother's Christian and Catholic faith led her to emphasize that good behavior, which included obeying the law, was pleasing God. So did my father's sense of military discipline.

But he knew better than most how our behavior as individuals could give people of ill will excuses to denigrate all black people. Thus my parents raised me with a sense of my personal responsibility for the good reputation of all those who share my heritage as a black American. I confess that I worked harder and sought to do better because my upbringing made me so conscious of that responsibility.

Did I feel humiliated by the scornful reject implied by segregation? Did I bridle at the casually open slurs, the insulting assumption of incapacity, the proffered friendship so often contemptuously rejected? Most military brats are often starting over at some new school. Racial bigotry added a special dimension of emotional pain to that always challenging transition.

I have learned to reject Nietzsche's specious maxim: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." What I learned from the military schooling of my life is this: A strong sense of responsibility for the reputation of others who, like myself, were unjustly despised, made me strive to do better. It helped me avoid the temptation to "get my own back" by channeling my justified resentment against bigotry into behavior that gives credence to slurs that demean all those I inevitably represent.

Better to err on the side of encouraging responsibility and positive achievement, than to widen the open wound race hatred inflicts.

People who think that telling the truth about black criminals somehow harms black people show no sense of this ironic strengthening of good purpose. Instead, they encourage people to wallow in their victimhood. They allow them to flaunt behaviors that are physically harmful, immorally abusive, economically and socially crippling to the black community as a whole. It would be better to encourage and enforce, by all means, the sense that wrong behavior damages all those who share what is, in the end, a kind of family background.

Better to err on the side of encouraging responsibility and positive achievement, than to widen the open wound race hatred inflicts by covering for those who channel their pain into behaviors that make the family’s pain and suffering so much worse. That which does not corrupt my goodwill makes me better. My experience suggests, however, that all such goodwill ultimately depends on the provisioner of all goodness, whose will is the best source of information for our own.

Is it merely coincidence that so many of the very people who pretend that it is racist to notice criminal behavior by a person of color also pretend that there is no God who inspires and helps nations to do good, despite injustice? Regardless of race, God deprecates abandoning the commitment to do right, according to the laws of His goodwill for our humanity. Regardless of race, we should strive never to do so, and reprove criminals who refuse to do the same.

Dr. Alan Keyes served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organizations under President Ronald Reagan, and ran for president in 1996, 2000 and 2008. He holds a Ph.D. in government from Harvard and writes at his website Loyal to Liberty.

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